To examine the effects of experience and training of a first person shooter (FPS) game on cognitive abilities, we conducted three experiments in which participants performed useful field of view (UFOV), visual working memory (VWM), and reaction time (RT) tasks. In Experiment 1, we compared performance on the three cognitive tasks between FPS players and non-FPS players. In Experiments 2 and 3, changes in task performance after 10-hr training or no training on the FPS game were examined. Experiment 1 showed that FPS players performed better than did non-FPS players on all cognitive tasks. Experiment 2 showed higher performance on all cognitive tasks after the training compared with those before it. Experiment 3 showed no enhancement of performance on all tasks. These results indicate that FPS game experience and/or training can enhance cognitive abilities at least for UFOV, VMW, and RT.

In this study, we verify the effectiveness of a sympathy expression model for a bystander robot that we have proposed. Because the social nature of a robot is important for communicating with multiple people, we focus on a robot that is in a bystander position, which is unrelated to the communication between participants. In our proposed model, the bystander can express emotions cooperatively in a group by learning the expressiveness of others. To test this, we assume an interaction of three robots using a neural network-based emotion generation model. The bystander learns moral emotions on the basis of its emotions from the communication between a speaker and an addressee. We verify the effectiveness of the model using a psychological model to evaluate the bystander from the position of the speaker.

In recent years, “Yuru-kyara” mascots, a class of mascot characters popularized by their characteristic of “yuru-sa”, have played important roles in the promotions of regional events and products. Although previous studies implicated the importance of structural and emotional factors for yuru-sa in Yuru-kyara mascots, it is unclear what factors affect or predict the impression of yuru-sa in these mascots. Here we examined structural and emotional factors that predict the yuru-sa impression in Yuru-kyara mascots. The independent t-tests and multiple regression analyses revealed that the factors of “childlikeness” and “friendliness” may correlate with a stronger impression of yuru-sa. Furthermore, we found that altering the ratio or size of structural factors showed different levels of the yuru-sa impression on the perceivers. We propose that our results may facilitate the design of Yuru-kyara mascots to be more appealing and effective in promoting brand images of local communities.

We investigated categorical regions and appearances of gold, silver and copper color, and glossiness for CG spheres with various chromaticities, lightnesses, and contrast glosses. It was found that the chromaticity regions of brown and yellow changed into gold color, those of gray and black into silver color, and a part of brown region changed into copper color with increase of contrast gloss. The magnitude estimates of gold, silver and copper color increased in high saturation chromaticity regions, achromatic regions, and medium saturation regions, respectively as the contrast gloss increased. As lightness levels increase gold and silver color estimates showed almost no change although copper color estimates decreased. It is suggested that the visual system would independently process glossiness and chromaticness of a surface in a lower level, and then, yield appearances of gold, silver and copper colors by combining them in a higher level.

This paper proposes how to measure similarity of melodies based on Implication-Realization Model (IRM). IRM is a music theory based on abstracting music and then expressing music through symbol sequences which is information constituting the music such as pitch, rhythm, and rests and so on. This paper especially extends IRM so that the theory becomes much more appropriate to measuring similarity of melodies. More specifically, compared with the symbols of the original IRM, we introduce finer grained symbols by simply distinguishing up and down of interval directions and by dividing each most symbols of the original IRM into two extended symbols. Furthermore, we implement a parser that transforms note sequence of an input melody into a sequence of the extended IRM symbols. The results of experimental evaluation through subjective human judgments show that the proposed extended IRM symbols outperform the original IRM symbols with respect to measuring similarity of melodies.

E-book sales have exhibited explosive growth recently. A glimpse of this trend occurred as early as about 30 years ago, when E-books were used as media for circulating CD-ROMs and PCs. Their recent popularity is largely attributable to the popularization of mobile terminals such as smart phones. The authors classified the previous e-books into the first–third generations and later into 4G e-books, and analyzed the latter. The characteristics of 4G e-books are classifiable into the following three points: (a) instant search for book contents, (b) close relation between book contents and readers, and (c) reduction of expenditures for book contents. The TSP model, a novel e-book sales method proposed by the authors, (1) enables readers who start reading to read a whole book free of charge during a certain period of time, and then shifts to a time fee. (2) It can set up this period for each book, and can do so for each reader individually and unrestrictedly. Moreover, analysis of readers' logs permits a bookseller to record purchasing behavior and plot a sales strategy for each customer. This paper demonstrates that the TSP model can realize the 4G e-book business.

A Product-Service System (PSS) is defined as a combined system to coincide with customer experience. However, due to the absence of a specified PSS design method, service design methods, such as service blueprint, are commonly applied for developing PSS design. In addition, they do not deal with the detailed activities of the interaction with products or the expectation around the use of PSS. In this research, a method to develop a new PSS concept is proposed through analysis of the correlation between the expectation and experience of an activity. This method is based on the system combining the basic unit of activity, expectation, and experience, and the two axis concept is used: one is related to the flow of activities and time, and the other is about the gap between the expectation and experience of an activity. Therefore, the purpose of this method is to satisfy the customer's expectation and needs by combining products and services based on an activity. A self-checkout system was chosen as an object of empirical research for the expectation and experience of a PSS activity. The activity is unitized into basic activities of using the self-checkout system. The structure of the expectation and experience, characteristics, and sequence of the activity are investigated. Hence, this research expects that the new method can be used as a development tool for designing an improved self-checkout system.

Measuring successful introduction of the access mode choice behavior with concerning the customer satisfaction is vital to improve the attractiveness of the service sector of public transport. This study examined a model with a statistical approach of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) to assess the affection of access mode choice to select the main public mode for regular travel purpose by using the data from a Stated Preference (SP) survey conducted to Colombo Metropolitan Area (CMA) in Western Province of Sri Lanka. From the results of final model estimation, it was revealed that the access mode choice affected to the decision of choosing public main mode and first select the main public mode and then select the access mode for traveling. The traveler decision of selecting mode is affected by the demographic characteristic and attitude towards the time, safety and comfort rather than the total cost of journey in the selected area.

This paper addresses the challenge of creating a new system to estimate the impression of an image. The proposed system combines the human annotated tags of images and an image classification method to discover “showing a photo, what are people looking at?”. Then, to tackle the challenge “what are they thinking about the one they look at?”, the semantic association strengths between adjectives and image keywords are computed by pointwise mutual information (PMI) and the pattern frequencies using a machine learning approach. To select the output, we use a rank aggregation method, Borda's method, to generate an acceptable ranking for a given set of rankings and the top na adjectives (in this paper na is 5) are chosen according to the estimated values. The main contribution of this method is to design an effective method for estimating the association of the impression adjectives with images. We evaluated the proposed approach using two tasks: the first one is the performance of the task of keyword extraction and the second one is the efficiency of the proposed method. For the performance of the proposed method, we carried out subjective experiments and obtained fairly good results.

This paper proposes an emotion transition model considering internal emotions and external inputs. The proposed model has internal emotion values representing each intensity of multiple emotions as internal states. Each intensity of emotions estimated from the input texts is given as the external inputs. These values of intensity are used in the antecedent part, and emotion transition is estimated by fuzzy inference. The proposed model can treat the same external inputs differently considering the internal states and it employs the idea of a psychological phenomenon, the mood congruency effect: The proposed model can express emotion transition more naturally. According to subjective evaluation experiments, high correlation between the proposed model and humans is obtained.

In Knitting fashion design, the emotional expression is multifaceted which has its special artistic language, forms and techniques. In this article, we focus on three aspects: capturing inspiration, the expression of knitting material texture and emotion, the emotional representation of overall creation.

We developed a bio-signal interactive virtual reality (VR) system to investigate the impression of users as a pilot study. In this study, three different VR scenes were given to the subjects of 20 healthy university students: bonfire (regulated with Electrocardiogram), firefly and butterfly (regulated with respiration signal). The subjective outcomes were assessed using the visual analogue scale. For the purpose of comparison, each subject also experienced the same scenes regulated with sinewave and random signals. The experiment was conducted by within-subject design: each subjects experienced three VR scenes and three input signals (bio-signal, sinewave, and random) in a counter-balanced order. As a result of the experiment, bio-signal interactive VRs can be observed as most comfortable and natural for subjects compared with the sinewave and random conditions.

Ceramic is one of Thai products that are always changing to meet customer's requirements. Knowing customer's need is the target of designers as well as developing a product that must satisfy customers. This research applies Affective Engineering and Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) approach into the customer-driven product design process. Affective Engineering serves to analyze the relationships between customer's perceptions and design characteristics. Six factors were retrieved: attractive, easy to drink, easy to handle, quality, modern and durable. Quantification Theory type 1 was applied to map the relationships between physical attributes and affective values. FAHP method was used to evaluate and to identify design characteristics that were compared and ranked to determine the most suitable design characteristics for a recommended design alternative. Afterward, based on all findings, some candidate samples were designed. The result of this study shows that these techniques can be applied to ceramic design in Thai manufacturing.

Senile cataract is a common cause of visual impairment among the elderly, yet its causes are still being investigated. Severe cataracts can progressively impair visual acuity and color discrimination in most afflicted patients. However, not all patients opt for surgery; instead, some use glasses as a temporary treatment. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 39 senile cataract patients regarding both their visual acuity and color discrimination after using corrective lenses. In this study, 19 (48.7%) patients described poor visual acuity or discomfort in either eye, while 16 (41.0%) reported problems with color discrimination. Using the National Eye Institute 25-Item Visual Function Questionnaire scores, we found that most patients reported improved vision and quality of life, but questions regarding general health, near activities, driving, and color vision remain to be addressed.

The mere exposure effect (MEE) is the phenomenon that repeated exposure to a stimulus promotes preference for that stimulus. Conventionally, the MEE has been observed as a result of successive presentation of a single object. This study instead examined whether the simultaneous exposure to multiple stimuli could modulate the MEE. The participants observed the stimulus display consisting of 1-25 stimulus elements and evaluated their preference for them. The results showed that the multiple element display produced a significant MEE when the stimulus elements were presented within the central visual field. More importantly, the exposure to the multiple element stimulus produced a stronger MEE when the number of elements was moderate. The present results suggest that the simultaneous exposure to multiple stimulus elements could facilitate the MEE but only when the number of stimulus elements does not exceed the capacity of processing resources.

A previous study has shown that there is a statistical similarity between the evaluation of impressions of Japanese fonts and of tea beverage package design. Recent research indicates that readable font design is related to subjective fluency. Here, we tested the effects of similarity between the evaluation of impressions of font designs and of package designs, and font legibility, on aesthetic impressions of packaging, using the 16 pictures combining fonts and packaging from the previous study. Thirty-four participants were asked to rate each in terms of aesthetic impressions (Balance, Harmony, Beauty, and Preference) and font legibility. The results showed that the similarity between the evaluation of elements had a greater positive effect on consumers' evaluation of aesthetic impression of packaging by mediation of improving font legibility. In conclusion, our results indicate that similarity between the evaluation of elements, and font legibility may be important when evaluating aesthetic impressions of packaging.